University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada.
Sci Data. 2023 Aug 26;10(1):567. doi: 10.1038/s41597-023-02464-w.
Public knowledge of what is said in parliament is a tenet of democracy, and a critical resource for political science research. In Australia, following the British tradition, the written record of what is said in parliament is known as Hansard. While the Australian Hansard has always been publicly available, it has been difficult to use for the purpose of large-scale macro- and micro-level text analysis because it has only been available as PDFs or XMLs. Following the lead of the Linked Parliamentary Data project which achieved this for Canada, we provide a new, comprehensive, high-quality, rectangular database that captures proceedings of the Australian parliamentary debates from 1998 to 2022. The database is publicly available and can be linked to other datasets such as election results. The creation and accessibility of this database enables the exploration of new questions and serves as a valuable resource for both researchers and policymakers.
公众了解议会中所说的话是民主的原则，也是政治学研究的重要资源。在澳大利亚，沿袭英国的传统，议会发言的书面记录被称为 Hansard。虽然澳大利亚 Hansard 一直公开可用，但由于仅以 PDF 或 XML 形式提供，因此难以用于大规模的宏观和微观层次的文本分析。受链接议会数据项目（Linked Parliamentary Data project）的启发，该项目为加拿大实现了这一目标，我们提供了一个新的、全面的、高质量的矩形数据库，该数据库从 1998 年到 2022 年捕获了澳大利亚议会辩论的记录。该数据库是公开的，并且可以与选举结果等其他数据集链接。该数据库的创建和可访问性使得能够探索新的问题，并为研究人员和政策制定者提供了宝贵的资源。
